LOUP GAROU

ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizzaro, United States of America

Loup Garou

Every half hour, Louisiana loses nearly a football field’s worth of coastal marshes to the Gulf of Mexico. Six major hurricanes since 2000 and this year’s massive BP oil spill have exacerbated an already dire situation. In Louisiana, so many of our cultural traditions and industries derive directly from our relationship with the rich waters and swamps that surround us. What will become of those traditions when the land that nurtures them disappears?

Award-winning performance innovators ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro present “Loup Garou”, a new environmental performance that uses rigorous physicality, poetry, music and visual installation to investigate the deep interconnectedness between land and culture in Louisiana. “Loup Garou” is part performance, part ritual, part howl to the world about southeast Louisiana’s plight. We invite you to join us as we sing a song of love and hope for our precarious homeland.

A new performance about the extinction faced by the Cajun Werewolf, Louisiana’s Wetlands and Louisiana’s Human Cultures.

What is a Loup Garou?
He is a wild and dangerous entity well anchored in the folk traditions of Louisiana. His story came from France through Acadia, Canada, or the Caribbean islands and through the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico border State of Louisiana. 

History
“Loup Garou” emerges out of a site-specific performance about coastal land loss that premiered in October 2006 at A Studio in the Woods in New Orleans, LA. Nick Slie of Mondo Bizarro worked on the performance, entitled “Beneath the Strata/Disappearing”, with Kathy Randels and ArtSpot Productions. “Loup Garou” is a continuation of that work. This project was developed with poet Raymond “Moose” Jackson throughout 2009 and premiered in New Orleans in October 2009.  The Infant Festival is the first of five “Loup Garou”performances this summer.  The rest will take place in the United States of America.

ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizzaro

ArtSpot Productions is an ensemble of artists dedicated to creating meticulously live theater in New Orleans. Their productions are a sincere blend of disciplines developed through ensemble authorship, physically rigorous training, original music, interactive sculptural environments, and extended research and re-hearsal. They practice social justice and shared power in their creative and organizational processes, and they strive to incite positive change in their community with visually stunning performances and empowering educational programs.

ArtSpot’s previous productions at the Infant Festival include: “Rage Within/Without” (1997) and “The End and Back Again, My Friend”(1998) featuring ArtSpot’s Artistic Director Kathy Randels. Randels also appeared at the 2002 Infant Festival in Dah Teatar’s collaboration with 7 Stages called “Maps of Forbidden Remembrance”. ArtSpot’s body of work includes: “How to be a Man in the 21st Century”; “Rumours of War”; “Nita & Zita”; “Chekhov’s Wild Ride”; and “New Orleans Suite”.

Mondo Bizarro has been creating daring, multidisciplinary art and fostering creative partnerships in local, national and international communities for the last seven years. They are a collective of individuals that create, present and produce a wide array of imaginative projects aimed at utilizing art as a tool for understanding what makes us commonly human and individually unique. Their work is intentionally enterprising, ranging from physical theater to large-scale community festivals; from social media to site-specific productions. Everything they do is fused with a hunger to develop fearless new works of art that illuminate the beauty and travails of the human condition.

ArtSpot and Mondo Bizarro have previously collaborated 2008’s award-winning “Flight”.

 “In the future, there will be two types of people: those who saw 'Loup Garou' and those who didn’t. Those who did will never forget it. ArtSpot Productions and Mondo Bizarro have transformed a section of City Park’s East Golf Course into a staging area for Raymond 'Moose' Jackson’s reinterpretation of South Louisiana’s loup garou legend. Poetic and hypnotic, it is a grand narrative involving personal heritage, Authority’s treatment of non-conformists, self-determination, and the land & the price we pay for not taking care of it. Unique in its presentation, it’s a tale filled with Shakespearean language and passions.”
Brian Sands, AmbushMag.com, November 2009